Up the Creek without a paddle!

Here is the next update which covers our exploration of the River Little Ouse, otherwise known as Brandon Creek, hence the headline.  Having explored the Lark we turned down the Great Ouse with a brief stop in Littleport for shopping and a fill with water.  A few miles downstream at the Ship Inn we turned up the Little Ouse and here are some pictures of the three days we spent on that river:

The building is the Ship Inn which is right at the junction of the Great and Little Ouse.  The view is looking up the Little Ouse with the bridge carrying the A10 between Ely and Kings Lynn.

This gives an idea of the scenery on the Little Ouse.  At first there are plenty of trees which give some shelter from the wind, but further up the river is wider (unusually) and much more open and exposed.

We passed this desirable residence a few miles up the Little Ouse.

The stone structure among the trees is an old lock which is no longer used.  Nowadays the only lock is at Brandon - more details later on this.

On Sunday we stopped for the day on some GOBA (Great Ouse Boating Association) moorings at Hockwold Fen, right out in the wilds.  A cruiser later joined us here.  No desirable walks from here so Ian spent the afternoon touching up various rust spots.

Though the day had been mostly cloudy, there was some colour in the sky as the sun went down.

The river crosses a watercourse known as the Relief Channel.  This joins the upper reaches of the rivers Lark, Little Ouse and Wissey and discharges to tidal water near Kings Lynn.  It serves two purposes.  First it can be used to divert water in flood conditions and second it can hold river water at high tide when the sea is held back at Denver Sluice. When the tide drops, it can be let out to sea.  The guillotine we are about to go under comes down when the river is diverted down the Relief Channel.

Here we are on Monday morning moored at Brandon, below the lock.  Why did we not go through the lock and moor in the centre of Brandon?  Well the lock which is to the left behind us is only about 45 feet long and Leo is 57 feet long.  What a silly idea building a lock this short!

For the rest of the day on Monday we left Leo and went cycling:

First we cycled to Weeting a couple of miles away.  Here is the village sign and down below you can make out a panel showing a Neolithic man down a mine.  All will be explained in a minute.

This is the church at Weeting which as you can see has a round tower.  This is something we've seen elsewhere in Norfolk and we had crossed into Norfolk at the lock as the river is the boundary here between Norfolk and Suffolk.

Weeting has a castle which is perhaps more properly described as a Norman Manor House and these are the remaining walls.  Like many of the other buildings round here it was built of flint.  So where did the flints come from?

Some stone was used for window arches and corners but flint is the primary building material because it was local and handy.

From Weeton we followed a track and then minor roads for a few miles to Grimes Graves.  The name of this Neolithic site (c2,600BC) is a bit of a misnomer as it was primarily a place full of flint mines.  This picture shows the depressions in the ground each of which was a shaft to a flint mine.

In each case a shaft was dug (with deer antler picks) about 30 feet down and then side galleries cut out to access the flints which are in narrow layers in the chalk.  This picture is taken looking into one of the galleries having come down a ladder into the pit opened for the public to see.  The black layer at the bottom of the wall is the layer of flint.  The mines here were so productive that raw and knapped flint objects were distributed all over England and onto the continent.  And all this nearly 5,000 years ago.  Very impressive and worth a visit.

We cycled on through Thetford Forest to Santon Downham where Helen got stuck in the girders of the bridge over the Little Ouse.  No, not really.  At this point we are about two miles above Brandon Lock and some sources say the river is navigable to this point.  It looked pretty shallow to us and might be OK for a canoe but not something bigger.

Curiously there is a GOBA mooring here as shown by the blue sign.  We used a stick to measure the depth of the water at the mooring.  One foot deep, so you would need a very shallow draft to use this one!!

A couple of miles along a back road took us back to Brandon after an interesting day on the bikes.  And that's about it for our exploration of the Little Ouse.  Today (Tuesday 11th) we have come back down the Little Ouse and we are presently back on the Great Ouse ready for our trip up the final tributary, the River Wissey.  More about that one in the next post.